The UK government abolished the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) on Monday 20 July, in the hours after Andy Burnham entered Downing Street.1 Gov.uk records the department as being replaced by the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Cabinet Office: three successor bodies where there had been one.2 Kanishka Narayan took the title Minister of State (Minister for Artificial Intelligence) across the Cabinet Office and the new business department from the same date, so responsibility for artificial intelligence (AI) policy now sits in two places at once.3
Thirteen days earlier, the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee had reported that Britain has no coherent strategic framework for sovereign technology.4 The department that would have drafted a response to that finding was dissolved before it could file one.
Whitehall reorganisations move budget lines before they move anything else, and that is where the sovereignty consequence sits. Oversight of the £500m Sovereign AI Unit and the £96m second-wave contracts now runs through two departments plus the Cabinet Office, each with its own accounting officer, rather than through a single permanent secretary answerable for the lot. Machinery-of-government changes of this size typically absorb a year of senior official time in transferring staff, contracts and delegated authorities. Whether the AI brief gains from sitting partly in the centre of government or loses from having no departmental home of its own will not be visible in any published document for months.
